Agility training and related writings about my dogs and myself

Daily Archives: January 17, 2011

This evening I put up the letter V drill. Easy setup of only 3 jumps. Scoop is really just now learning to decelerate and turn well and the ping pong drills and multiple front crosses gave me places to reward all the turns and then open the drill back up again and run around the 270 pattern. Which letter will we do tomorrow…. we leave for a show tomorrow so maybe something with lots of variation…I will sleep on it:)

While I was working on proofing the pages for the Alphabet Book, I realized that there are so many of the letters that I still need to train with Scoop. I have decided to systematically go through each one of the original Alphabet drills over the next month, starting with some of the most fundamental exercises and progressng to the more difficult patterns and drills. Yesterday we started with the letter O. I love this simple setup. Here’s a couple of the drills I did with front crosses at the side change.

Scoop was really good. The first order of business was just to do the full circle a few times in both directions. He got into a nice rhythm with his jumping. Once I released him from my side to start the circle I just moved parallel with him in the circle, not giving any verbal commands. I wanted to see if he would travel around the circle with minimal cues. Then I started putting in a front cross back to the inside of the circle to go in the opposite direction, like the top drill, and then I worked on putting the front cross after three jumps, and I took him to the outside of the circle and then right back around to another front cross after three jumps. Bottom drill. That is also a good one to do with rear crosses.We also trained all the clover leaf front crosses, and worked one of my favorite exercises, front cross to rear cross.

Pull out your old Clean Runs and follow our progress with your dog. There have been some changes since the original publication, there are some new drills in the book, and some old ones removed. Not everything has been changed though. I didn’t want to totally rewrite each and every exercise. I AM trying to be more careful about where I put my handlers and the lines I show in the drills. When I first started the articles I wasn’t as careful on handler placement, and I wasn’t careful to proof where the editors might have changed things slightly because of all the crowded lines and dogs and icons:)

Have fun with the letter O if you get a chance to run it soon. Right now it’s my absolute favorite letter!